42-year-old sold his company for $1.3 billion: ‘One of the traits of highly successful people is really never being satisfied'for $1.275 billion, a culmination of seven years of hard work building and perfecting his software platform. Pulling off a billion-dollar exit can be life-changing, but Wells was soon back at work and thinking about what comes next, he says.If anything, the sale made Wells think about"just how relative success is," he tells CNBC Make It.
"Somehow, we have the ability no matter what level of success you achieve, you're always looking at the next thing that you can do," says Wells.As a teenager growing up in Miami, Wells dreamed of a career in the film industry. He skipped college and, at age 19, moved to New York to bartend while honing his filmmaking skills, with an eye on picking up freelance gigs as a video editor.paved the way for Wells to open a boutique video post-production business called Katabatic Digital.
Wells could have continued with Katabatic, making a good living, for the rest of his career. Instead, he and Katabatic engineer John Traver started tinkering with software coding in their spare time — hoping to build a piece of software they could sell for big money, Wells says. "I was like, 'Well, I'm not actually successful in this group of people,'" says Wells."That's a wild thing ... 'Am I king of the world? Not at all.'"Having sold a billion-dollar startup, Wells says he's no longer"super motivated by trying to achieve some new financial level.